Disinformation from the Voice of America About Zakat

I was very sad to have to write this article. During much of the 1980s, the Voice of America, via its shortwave radio broadcasts, provided a valuable service to America by beaming powerful messaging behind the Iron Curtain, giving hope to millions of people enslaved by communism.

Today the VOA is a shadow of its former self. It has become a politically correct mouthpiece providing no real useful content, often just parroting the politically correct garbage put out by the so-called mainstream media. And it does so largely on the internet, rather than by shortwave radio broadcasts.

This week the VOA posted an article dealing with zakat and Muslim charities, two topics that we have covered extensively here on SFW over the years:

The VOA article reads like propaganda and fails to provide a balanced–or even accurate–analysis of zakat or Islamic charities.

It even contains one glaring mistake that appears to be outright disinformation, namely that zakat can go to non-Muslims.

This is expressly forbidden in shariah. There is no prohibition on charitable donations to non-Muslims, but zakat itself, which, despite what the article states, is not the same as charitable giving, cannot go to non-Muslims.

Zakat is not the same as charity. Zakat is an obligation, more like a tax than a form of tithing.

The article also fails to point out that there are 8 specified destinations for zakat. Of particular interest to those of us in the West is the seventh category. From pages 364-365 of A Summary of Islamic Jurisprudence, Volume 1:

“The seventh category is that spent in the Cause of Allah such as that given to warriors who volunteer in fighting for the Cause of Allah and they do not take salaries from the Public Treasury of Muslims. Generally, the phrase “the Cause of Allah” refers to the war against the enemies of Muslims, as Allah, Exalted be He.”

It is because of this tenet of shariah that so many Muslim charities have been implicated in funding terrorism.

Another organization prominently featured in the VOA article was ICNA, the Islamic Circle of North America, which was identified as a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate in the largest terrorism financing trial in US history, the US v the Holy Land Foundation.

A few years ago we identified ICNA’s charitable arm as instructing followers to specifically fund jihad:

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Shariah The Threat to America is the result of months of analysis, discussion and drafting by a group of top security policy experts concerned with the preeminent totalitarian threat of our time: the legal-political-military doctrine known within Islam as “shariah.”

It is designed to provide a comprehensive and articulate second opinion on the official characterizations and assessments of this threat as put forth by the United States government.